Gathering Storm
- Join our UK associate David Blandy to explore the impacts of colonial food production through a new collaborative world-building game with guest players: Susuana Amoah, Annie Jael Kwan and Jamie Sutcliffe.
Delfina Foundation, London
Tuesday, 29 November / 18:30-20:30 / Free
Join David Blandy at Delfina Foundation to play Gathering Storm, a collaborative worldbuilding game created on his residency as part of this season’s Politics of Food programme in association with Gaia Art Foundation. Supported by invited guests Susuana Amoah, Annie Jael Kwan and Jamie Sutcliffe. No roleplay gaming experience is necessary, everyone over 18 is welcome. Complementary alcoholic and non-alcoholic pineapple-based drinks will be provided.
During his residency Blandy has been exploring his familial link to colonial food production and its legacy of agriculture as a tool to consolidate authority. His paternal grandfather was involved in the Swynnerton Plan, a British colonial scheme initiated in the 1950s with the aim of creating an African middle class in Kenya: a form of social engineering through agriculture. His grandfather taught local farmers how to grow cash crops such as pineapples and green beans, developing very sour pineapples that were suitable for preservation in syrup, for canning and export.
He always regretted both the imposition of cash crops and also the introduction of the use of the pesticide DDT. The scheme was a symptom of a wider culture of violent control, as Britain fought to hold onto colonial rule.
Tuesday, 29 November 2022 / 18:30-20:30 / Delfina Foundation
Access information regarding the building and events can be found on www.delfinafoundation.com/access
Biographies
Susuana Amoah is the University of Sussex Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow (2021/2022). She is a Brighton-based cultural activist, artist-curator, and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice encompasses socially-engaged art, fugitive feminism, decolonial praxis and exploring creative ways of highlighting narratives and social movements by marginalised groups.
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher based in London and working between the UK, Europe and Asia. Her exhibition-making, programming, publication, and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, cultural and pedagogicalactivism with an interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative histories and knowledges, collective practice and solidarity. She co-leads Asia-Art-Activism, the interdisciplinary research network, and is the founding council member of Asia Forum that unfolded across digital gatherings in 2021 and an inaugural programme in Venice at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in 2022.
Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. His work explores artistic encounters with science fictive fabulation, the politics of gaming, animation and its multiple entanglements with developments in the life sciences, haunted media, the digital uncanny, and the persistence of myth, all understood as technologies of selfhood. He is the editor of Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, and his essays, reviews, and interviews have been featured in Art Monthly, Frieze, The White Review, Rhizome, Art Review, The Quietus, Art Agenda, Bricks From The Kiln, and IsThisIt, amongst others.
POLITICS OF FOOD
This event is part of the public programme of Delfina Foundation’s fifth season of the Politics of Food, in partnership with Gaia Art Foundation and with additional support from a range of individuals and partners.
